Direction Sense — The Compass Method and the Shortest-Distance Formula

Free Marks, If You Pick Up a Pen

Direction-sense questions are the cheapest marks in any reasoning section — and the ones most often lost. Not because the logic is hard, but because students try to hold the whole walk in their head instead of putting it on paper.

Every question in this family is the same object: a person, a starting direction, and a sequence of moves and turns. The paper then asks one of three things — where the person ends up, how far they are from the start, or which way they are now facing.

The method never changes:

1. 1.Draw a compass in the corner of your rough sheet, North at the top, before you read the question.
2. 2.Mark the starting point and put an arrow on it showing the initial facing.
3. 3.Draw each leg roughly to scale, one at a time, in the order given.

Thirty seconds of drawing beats three minutes of visualising, every single time.

1. Rohit walks 5 km east, then turns left and walks 4 km, then turns left again and walks 5 km. How far is he from his starting point and in which direction?

2. A girl walks 12 metres south from her house and then 5 metres west. What is the shortest distance between her and her house?

3. A boy stands facing the rising sun early in the morning. In which direction does his shadow fall?

4. If South-East becomes North, and North-East becomes West, and all other directions rotate in the same way, what will West become?

5. A man facing north walks 3 km, turns right and walks 3 km, turns right and walks 5 km, turns left and walks 3 km, then turns left and walks 2 km. Where is he now with respect to his starting point?

6. A person facing north turns 45° clockwise, then 180° clockwise, and finally 270° anticlockwise. Which direction is he facing now?

7. Ravi is standing face to face with Meena. Meena says that the temple is to her left. Relative to Ravi, where is the temple?

8. At about 5 o'clock in the evening, in which direction does the shadow of a vertical pole fall?